Even before the carnage inside Kabul airport was sorted and identified, before the squads of sober officers were deployed to inform stateside next of kin, and before the caskets were filled, closed, and draped with flags for the final flight home, this much we knew: Another Afghan Muslim "partner" in uniform -- a veteran Air Force pilot -- had opened fire on NATO trainers in a meeting, killing eight U.S. military personnel and an American contractor.

Question: Will our U.S. representatives -- and those of the deceased -- pay attention to this latest Afghan attack on Americans? If so, will they a) yawn; b) cluck; c) raise hell; d) none of the above?

The fact is, these murders are not "just one of those things" -- the unfortunate outcome of a "disagreement," or even "financial pressures" as mentioned, straight-faced, in early reports. These ritualistic murders of Westerners, like similar assaults before them, are the most shocking manifestations of our foundationally flawed policy of nation-building in the Islamic world. They are some of the flesh-and-blood sacrifices to the make-believe "Democracy Project," whose postmodern-day missionaries believe must be advanced on the backs of the U.S. military according to the quasi-holy doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN).

Jim Lacey is a professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College.

Good. Judging by his recent piece at NRO, he has common sense, the basis of any successful strategy. Lacey went to Afghanistan recently, and didn't fall for the old "fragile and reversible" routine, as House Speaker Boehner recently did. In fact, Lacey thinks Afghanistan can "swim on its own."

I sat through darn near two hours of Fox News last night, something I rarely do, and heard not one word about the Kabul Airport Massacre that left nine Americans dead yesterday at the hands of an Afghan Air Corps officer. There was, however, a recurring crawl reporting the incident along with the killer's possible motive -- financial pressures. ABC News, meanwhile, ran a deeply disturbing report that the killer disarmed all of the Americans and Afghans in the room priot to killing the Americans, execution-style. Why? Because, as many in the media would spin it, the killer had had to sell his home recently, which is what his alleged brother claimed.

Remember Faizal Shahzad, the Times Square Would-be-bomber of 2010? The media babbled on about the financial pressures, including home foreclosure, that must have surely driven Shahzad's attempted act of jihad, trained and supported by Pakistani Taliban, in heart of midtown Manhattan last spring -- becausewhatelsecoulditbe? Of course, when...

The caption on this EPA photo is: "Afghan Army soldiers secure the military base after a shooting incident." The killer of nine NATO troops and a contractor was an Afghan Air Corps officer. Is the base secure?

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The carnage inside an operations room of the Afghan Air Corps at Kabul airport has yet to be sorted, identified and tallied but this much we know: Another Afghan Muslim "partner" in uniform -- a veteran military pilot according to the AP -- has opened fire on NATO troops in a meeting, killing as many as eight troops and a contractor.

While we await the grim but thoroughly predictable details -- the exemplary lives of the personnel murdered while "partnering" with our Afghan "allies"; the shooter who for reasons "unknown" to ISAF earned his place in Islamic paradise through this "holiest" act of jihad against infidels...

My friend John Work, an occasional contributor at this site before he started his own blog at Here's the Right Side of It, sent me his alarming report about Youtube pulling the account of Vlad Tepes, a primo website of the counter-jihad, purportedly over an old copyright issue but quite possibly under pressure stemming from a fatwa. Details here.

Part of the attraction of Vlad Tepes is the blog's selection of video footage from around the world that captures the approaching, encroaching, invading and entrenching migration of Islam into the West -- something our sorry excuse for Big Media and also Conservative Media (read Fox) refuse to report.

There is something fishy about the fact that the US government unclassified good intelligence attesting to the connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq back in 2007 but made the rest of us wait for it forever -- or until Wikileaks came along to release the information in 2011. Luckily, Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard noticed as it went by. His report opens:

A former Guantanamo detainee “was identified as an Iraqi intelligence officer who relocated to Afghanistan (AF) in 1998 where he served as a senior Taliban Intelligence Directorate officer in Mazar-E-Sharif,” according to a recently leaked assessment written by American intelligence analysts. The former detainee, an Iraqi named Jawad Jabber Sadkhan, “admittedly forged official documents and reportedly provided liaison between the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Forget Sun Tzu and von Clauswitz. With tea-meister Mortenson unmasked, US military strategists are now turning to Lewis Carroll for tips on moving effortlessly from war to war, from mess to mess, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya without missing a sip. See if the following excerpt isn't US policy in a Mad Hatter's tea cup:

`I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter: `let's all move one place on.'

He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse's place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change: and Alice was a good...

I have struck up some mighty fine e-meetings of the mind through my column over the years; none more appreciated than my military penpals. After last week's musings and column on the spectacular unravelling of Greg Mortenson, Pentagon "Three Cups" guru-sage, I received the following email from Paul Avallone, who served in Special Forces in Afghanistan (Nangarhar) in 2002-2003, later returning as a photo-journalist in 2006 and 2008. Along the way, I have published some of Paul's work, notably his you-are-there...

Writing at The Corner, Nina Shea recaps the latest in the saga of Terry Jones, who has been trying to take a peaceful, non-flammable protest of sharia and jihad to the sidewalk outside the largest mosque in America in Dearborn, Michigan only to be outlawed by the Michigan District Court. Like all other envelop-pushing cases, this latest incident serves as a stress test of the rule of law in our society. And, like most other such envelop-pushing cases, it proves that the rule of law is strong -- only the law that is strong is sharia (Islamic) law.

The Michigan District Court's egregious ruling against Jones is all about protecting Islam from criticism, rather than about protecting criticism from Islam, which is what US jurisprudence, not to mention the American Way, demands. It is sharia that the US court is enforcing.

One particularly hideous aspect of the ruling bars Pastor Jones and his colleague Assistant Pastor Wayne Sapp from visiting the vicinity of this mosque for the next three years. Jones and Sapp are American citizens; the area the court has barred to them is in American territory. With this ruling, the judge has made the court both the creator and also the enforcer of what amounts to a public, criticism-free and protest-free zone for Islam, a place in USA where "blasphemy" against Islam is against the law.

This (above) is "postcard" from Afghanistan by Paul Avallone, someone who has drunk more than his share of cups of tea there. first as a Green Beret and later as a photojournalist. Readers will recall his pungently evocative writings and photos from his "Flirting with Afghanistan" series published here in 2010.

It is a most fitting image to illustrate my syndicated column this week on "Three Cups of Tea."

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"Why Did the Pentagon Listen to Greg Mortenson?"

To say that the memoir "Three Cups of Tea" is the basis of the bitter pill that is American counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is a falsehood and gross exaggeration -- like much of the book itself, as it...

I don't know which is more outrageous: the State Department memo claiming that the Libyan "rebels" -- sorry, their "political arm" -- has "embraced the Geneva Conventions" (death grip?), or that Uncle Sucker (you) will be catering their halal meals (via Andrew Bostom).

As you read John Rosenthal's important and harrowing compilation of "rebel" atrocities, all uploaded to Youtube in the high-tech-jihadi tradition, see for yourself what the rebs have embraced right there in the open in the main square of the "rebel" capital of Benghazi.

After gag-recovery, do ask your Congressman just why it is the US has now decided to pay out precious taxpayer dollars ($25 million in "non-lethal aid") to cook for and cater to, in every sense of the word, such savages. And why isn't the MSM or Fox covering this story of now considerable American interest? What Rosenthal has found should be front and center in the media so Americans can actually evaluate the decisions being made in our name, and make informed decisions about the use of our money and military in the future. But it's not. Why not?

Best-selling writer Jon Krakauer has published his own 75-page expose, Three Cups of Deceit (download here), which includes an account of how he, Krakauer, was taken to the cleaners as a donor to Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson's institute, CAI, even before he realized the Mortenson myth was extensively fabricated, which Krakhauer also details in shocking detail.

Of course, we've seen fabricated memoirs before. But Mortenson's takes the cake for both its use as charity bait for schoolchildren and bona fides for Mortenson's role as an unofficial advisor of Pentagon COINdinistas.

Now, the book's publisher is "reviewing" the book's content, and the Attorney General of Montana is opening an inquiry into Mortenson's charity CAI.

Maybe it was that comment quoted by Krakauer from a former treasurer of the CAI board who said that Mortenson regarded CAI as his personal ATM....

For some years now, there have been a few voices sounding the alarm on "Muslim outreach" -- the intensive engagement the US government entered into post 9/11 with a rogue's gallery of Imam Flim Flams and Muslim taqiyya artists that has subverted our nation's response to jihad, violent and stealthy, to spread the rule of Islam.

One of the most salient voices sounding this alarm has been that of Stephen Coughlin, now a Team B II colleague, who, as the senior military staff's sole expert on Islamic threat doctrine (jihad), was unceremoniously dropped by the Pentagon back in 2008 when his now-famous jihad brief came to the attention of one Hesham Islam, senior aide to Gordon England, Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush administration. (More on Coughlin's case and Hesham Islam to be found here.)

One of Coughlin's key insights is that in relying on "Muslim outreach" for our interpretations of jihad and other...

From the AP, news that 60 Minutes may be about to tell us that Greg Mortenson, guru to military brass, is a phony.

Did I say "phony"? Big fat phony is more like it.

I wrote about Mortenson's status as unofficial Pentagon advisor to Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal et al after Mortenson's bestselling book, Three Cups of Tea, became a hit with their wives. Not just a hit. Required reading before anyone deploys to Afghanistan.

To the east, an Afghan Army suicide bomber murdered five NATO soldiers and five Afghans. The Taliban claimed credit.

Update: All five NATO soldiers were Americans from the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

That brings the four-month total of Western forces killed "inside the wire" by their own supposed Afghan allies to 27.

In the south, two separate Taliban IED explosions killed three NATO soldiers. No word on injuries.

Meanwhile, back in Kabul, Hamid Karzai met with Pakistan, almost literally in a symbolic way, to discuss peace talks with the Taliban and other "reconciliation" issues. Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart Gilani announced "an upgraded Afghanistan-Pakistan Joint Commission comprising of top-ranking officials...to accelerate and promote a peace process."

Reading about another catastrophically maimed casualty of the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) in Afghanistan, I was struck by a biographical note. This young American, now a triple amputee after stepping on an IED while on foot patrol, an integral feature of COIN's hearts-and-minds efforts, was only 11 years old when the war in Afghanistan began.

Come October, this war will have lasted a decade. Last month, the Iraq War passed the eight-year mark. During the Vietnam War, the question was whether there was any "light at the end of the tunnel." In these wars, we have to wonder whether there is any tunnel. If so, no one seems to be in any hurry to get out.

Why? Why is it that we have come to accept war without end -- not to mention, I would (and do) argue, war without benefit? And why does it actually seem as though our leaders want it this way?

There are reasons and they are shocking.

Watching Defense Secretary Gates in Iraq recently where he practically begged to leave U.S. forces in place after the scheduled pullout in December 2011, Jed Babbin, I think, nailed it. Writing in the American Spectator, Babbin guessed that President Obama just doesn't want Iraq to fall apart, at least not on the eve of the 2012 election. Ditto Afghanistan. And falling apart -- I would call it reverting to type -- is the inevitable result of U.S. withdrawal. "Who lost Iraq and Afghanistan?" is not a question Obama wants to get into during the election. Thus, Obama will slog on with COIN, maintaining his weirdly logical wartime alliance with the neoconservative, democracy-project Right. On Obama's part, this is a political calculation, pure and simple. On the Right, something else is going on.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood website is reporting that a delegation from the British Foreign Office visited the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Alexandria. According to the report:

A delegation from the British Foreign Office, headed by Consul General Marie-Louise Archer, on Thursday visited the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s administrative office in Alexandria. The delegation held the meeting in the presence of former MB Parliamentary Bloc Spokesperson Hamdy Hasan, group members and head of the MB administrative office Hussein Ibrahim.

‘The meeting was attended by the Relations Coordinator for the UK foreign Office Martin Hetringen,’ Archer said, adding that the meeting comes...

Recon Marine Cpl. Todd Love (above) got a hero's welcome in his hometown of Acworth, Georgia this week. Love lost both legs and his left arm in an IED explosion in Afghanistan a few months ago. The Washington Examiner story below by Sara Carter tells us that even if US forces had photographed the bomber in the act and captured him with bomb traces on his hands, they would then have had to feed him, clothe him ... and let him go.

This is another Afghanistan scandal that should get Congress pounding tables and demanding answers from the Pentagon and the White House. It should get readers doing the same. After all, we pay $350 million a day for this.

My dear friends Gina and Michael Pack see their long-in-the-works documentary "Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton," written by the excellent historian Richard Brookhiser, debut tonight on PBS at 10pm (check, as they say, local listings to be sure of the time slot).

This is no common documentary. Not only is the subject one of the most exceptional men America can claim as her own, but the consistently creative and energetic skills the filmmakers use to bring this overlooked if not almost neglected Founder into modern-day, all-too-empty consciousness make for some extremely memorable, non-Ken-Burnsian dramatic sequences. Some work better than others to bring our Hamilton back to extraordinary life -- for example, his out-of-the-blue emergence from flyspeck Carribean islands where he was born a bastard and then orphaned is vividly depicted on location in St Croix and Nevis; the...

Back in April 2009, I wrote a column, based around an interview with Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely (Ret.), called "Let Afghanistan Go." Almost two years later to the day, here, once more with feeling, is this week's column:

Two more American soldiers were killed this week by a "lone" Afghan "ally." These latest murders took place inside a compound in the northern Afghan province of Faryab where the soldiers were providing security for a meeting between U.S. trainers and Afghan border police.

I can't find more details, not even the soldiers' names, but let's use our imagination. Two presumably young soldiers arrived safely with their team at the Afghan border police compound near the Afghan border with Turkmenistan. They probably thought the first hard part of the day was over, that they were behind a secure perimeter and could have a smoke or a chew or a stick of gum and wait until they had to mount up and face the booby-traps and sniper harassment that would follow them home. It was at this point that their killer, an Afghan police officer, moved in on them. Maybe he was even assigned to "partner" with them. He greeted them, offered something to eat, might even have told them a joke, who knows? While they were eating, smoking, laughing, somehow off guard, he shot them dead.

I write about David Petraeus now and then -- ok, considering him a primary architect and implementer of the Arabist-tilted policy (long denied on the Right) of endless armed social work (Great Society Goes to War) masquerading as national security strategy that is leading (has led) to our national suicide, I write about him quite a lot -- but who needs words with a picture like this?

The good thing about the war in Libya costing us "billions a week," according to certified CPA and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), is that it makes the $50 million "donation" the United States has mde to the Afghan-Taliban "reconciliation" talks look like chump change.

An update from DPA on this week's murders of two US troops by an Afghan police officer:

Afghan and NATO forces Thursday killed a rogue Afghan policeman who had shot dead two US soldiers in the northern province of Faryab earlier this week, the alliance said.

Acting on intelligence reports regarding the whereabouts of the assassin, the combined forces conducted an operation in the provincial capital Maimanah, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.

'The successful operation resulted in the death of the individual responsible for the shooting,' the statement said, adding that two other suspected insurgents were detained for further questioning.

The assailant, who was identified only as Sarwar by Afghan security sources, on Monday turned his weapon on the US soldiers at an outpost while...

What happens when Everyguy Icon Bill O'Reilly pushes the calamitous absurdity that Pastor Terry Jones "has blood on his hands," and Hezbollah puts a $2.4 million bounty on Jones' head?

We don't know.

We do know the epic scale of invective hurled at Jones the world over has helped turn this American citizen who has broken no law but Islam's into a moving target. But it has also objectified a human being. When Jones is gratuitously disparaged as a "kook," a "nut," an "insane Christian" (as O'Reilly said), and much, much worse for his (perfectly logical) symbolic act of putting on trial and burning a copy of a book that codifies conquest and enslavement, supremacism and bigotry, Jones is making a statement. Just as Fitna made a statement. Just as the Pope's Regensberg Address made a statement. Just as the publication -- and particularly the re-publication -- of the Danish Motoons made a statement. These statements vary but none of them violate legal, peaceful means of expression....

As a longtime News Corp.-watcher, Prince-Talal-watcher, Talal-News-Corp-watcher, I'm not saying, I'm just saying:

Wednesday, March 30, 2011: James Murdoch, youngest son of Rupert Murdoch, "cemented his position as his father's eventual heir to run the entertainment conglomerate when he was elevated this week to the No. 3 position in the company's executive ranks." To help things set better, he's moving from London to New York.

April 4, 2011: Bill O'Reilly says Pastor Terry Jones "has blood on his hands" after Jones burns a copy of the Koran in Florida and Muslims in Afghanistan murder people.

April 4, 2011: To discuss the mayhem and murder that was the Afghan Muslim response to the burning of a copy of the Koran in Florida, Sean...

These latest slayings took place inside a compound in the northern Afghan province of Faryab where the soldiers were providing security for a meeting between US trainers and Afghan border police.

I can't find more details, not even the soldiers' names, but let's use our imagination. Two presumably young soldiers arrived safely with their traveling team at the Afghan border police compound near the Afghan border with Turkmenistan. There, US trainers were meeting with Afghan border police. Was this to get or pass along information? Complain or praise recent activities? Plan yet another training session? We have no idea. But the soldiers probably believed the first hard part of the day was over, that they were behind a secure perimeter, could have a smoke or a chew or a stick of gum, and wait until they had to mount up and face the booby traps and sniper harassment that would follow them home. It was at that point that their killer, an Afghan police officer, approached. Maybe he was even assigned to them....

Below, I am posting links to a 2-part video by a gal in Colorado named Ann Barnhardt whom I am most pleased to call a fellow citizen -- as opposed to such fellow citizens as the craven Lindsey Graham, the battle-stressed David Petraeus and the Islamophile Barack Obama (?), to name a few of the most prominent dhimmis functioning in and dominating the public space.

About that public space: It's extremely hard to get a word in there -- hard to stand out against the static, hard to punch through the murk of propaganda and appeasement that serves as an excuse for news and policy. Punching through becomes the work of activists, lightning rods, so-called "zealots," people whom it is all too easy for gloss-encased, college-pedigreed elites to dismiss as "nuts," and worse. Random, recent examples here, here.

But, folks -- due to the emergency crisis in our leadership, civilian and military, professional and clerical, and their total surrender to Islam, as evidenced never before...

... General David Petraues has issued a statement in conjunction with NATO SCR -- that means Senior Civilian Representative -- Ambassador David Sedwill:

KABUL, Afghanistan – In view of the events of recent days, we feel it is important on behalf of ISAF and NATO members in Afghanistan to reiterate our condemnation of any disrespect to the Holy Quran and the Muslim faith.

We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Quran.

Not "the Koran" (AP style; at least it was last time I checked; not even "Islam's holy book," but -- just declaratively -- "the Holy Quran." (Meanwhile, don't look now but they forgot the politically correct apostrophe!)

Not to be outstyled by the "avenging" Gray Lady, The Christian Science Monitor wins Dhimmi of the News-Day today for this headline:

"Terry Jones: How free speech and Quran burning can lead to violence"
Is it really necessary to explain that free speech is speech and not violence; that burning the Koran is burning a bunch of wood pulp, and not violence; that violence is violence and that the only thing that "led" to it, now as always, are barbaric imams who, following the laws of Islam, exhorted their rabid flock to kill "infidels"?

Yes.

These elementary facts have gone lost in the blur of dhimmitude from which the fearful outcry against Terry Jones has yet to reach its crescendo.

It's all his fault, the world shrieks, embarking on a leap of logic and laspe of morality in order to equate this symbolic act with a bloodlust massacre. Exhibit A; Our President.

I shouldn't do this, at least not on the weekend, but I glanced at the NYT (which used to be called The Gray Lady) and saw this A1 headline:

"Afghans Avenge Koran Burning, Killing 12"

As someone who knows that the Koran, like Gone with the Wind or the Bible, is a book, an inaminate object, a thing, a bound bunch of printed material, I have a problem with the word "avenge." The dictionary tells us "avenge" means:

Inflict harm in return for (an injury or wrong done to oneself or another)

Inflict such harm on behalf of (oneself or someone else previously wronged or harmed)

A book going up in smoke harms no one.

The New York Times' use of "avenge" in a declarative headline shouts over the traditional, normal, rational, reflex Western reaction to this heinous event: namely, that it is one freakishly barbaric bunch of savages who can go to "religious" services and then mass to massacre 12 innocent people over a burnt book. The use...

This week, the commander of NATO, U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, let the jihad out of the bag. He told the U.S. Senate that among the Libyan rebels -- you know, our guys, the ones on whose behalf we've fired off about $1 billion worth of ordinance at Libya -- "we have seen flickers in the intelligence of potential al-Qaida, Hezbollah."

That means the U.S. military is fighting on behalf of the flickers that took down the World Trade Center in 2001 and the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983.

Does anyone care?

Next question: Wouldn't we all salute if Stavridis had next told the Senate that, as a result of this heinous policy, which orders U.S. forces to participate in a mission to advance the cause of global jihad, he would be stepping down from his command in protest?

The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights announced it would open an investigation of the University “for its failure to eliminate a hostile sexual environment on campus, in violation of Title IX,” according to a press release written by the complainants received Thursday afternoon by the News.

If I really wanted to muck up my website, I would quote the pornographically lewd chants alleged to have been publicly performed by Yale men -- I use the term loosely -- on the Old Campus, and which appear to have fueled this scandal. Suffice it to say, it is not a "violation of Title IX" that is at issue here but the sloping, sliding degradation of a decadent culture.

In a culture that revels in shamelessness, that glories in the base, that celebrates the crude, of course, the "best and brightest"(read: privileged)...

Photo by AP: Elham Omar Hotaki, deputy of the pilot project of the planned New Kabul City walks past by a white line showing part of the outline of a planned new city north of Kabul.

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If you like US Marines walking around Marja handing out $50,000 a day, you'll love the US taxpayer, the Japanese, others and, of course, "private investors" injecting untold billions to build "New Kabul City." Maybe they can get some collateral-free, interest-free, free loans from Bank of Kabul?

From the AP:

KABUL, Afghanistan — “New Kabul City” — a shiny new, multibillion-dollar project — sounds like a pipe dream to people living practically on top of each other in Afghanistan’s war-battered capital, where most streets are unpaved...

With the lion's share coming from the US, the world put at least $100,000,000 into Marja and environs half a century ago -- snd that worked out so well. After seizing Marja from the Taliban last year, the US couldn't wait to start throwing money down the Marja drain again and started paying "hundreds of thousands of dollars a week" for Afghan hearts and minds. Guess what? We're still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in Marja for Afghan hearts and minds -- "$500,000 every ten days in a poor rural community of 250,000," according to the Economist last month. (Afghan hearts and minds have gotten soo-o expensive.)

Um, doesn't Congress have something or other to do with the nation's purse strings? Responsibility...? Or has the American taxpayer become a cash cow as recklessly used and abused as the (American-taxpayer-funded) Bank of Kabul?

On the one hand, to be smeared by the Anti-Defamation League for combatting the incursions of Islamic law into this country is a badge not just of honor -- which it is -- but of effectiveness. To be smeared by the ADL as "anti-Muslim" is a sign that your debate is not dead-ending at your office wall, but advancing, catching the ears and engaging the minds of your fellow citizens. To trigger the slander machine of the ADL, which by now surely qualifies as the leading dhimmi organization for Islamic apologetics outside of a Saudi-funded university department, tells you that that your marshalling of the evidence, the facts about Islam -- its law (sharia), its culture of conquest, its blood- and tear-stained history of victimization -- is actually cutting through the thick and stultifying layer of lies and happy talk which irresponsible leaders have foisted upon us in the place of honesty, in place of reality itself, particularly since 9/11.

There is a new divide by which we define ourselves: Those who suck in the acrid smell of jihad in the Middle East, pronounce their hallucinations "Arab Spring," crave more ... and those who don't. Among those of us who "just say no" to this nowhere trip, it should be noted, are those who take their sharia seriously, and see its extension as the lingering and insidious side effect, the one that take us down when the vapors are no more.

The Fox News commentariat is where you find the highest and most persistent rate of "Arab Spring" abuse, as Andy McCarthy notes here, Fred Grandy here, but its use is widespread and indiscriminate because it enables users to see the world as they want to see it. On the conservative side of the spectrum, one dose of "Arab Spring" and the "Bush freedom agenda" looks like a brilliantly red, white and blue success, not the...

From the Netherlands, a shot of pure oxygen and a beam of truth from the wonderful Geert Wilders to a world constricted by fear and doubt. Breathe and bask.

"Time to Unmask Mohammed" by Geert Wilders, from the Dutch magazine HP/De Tijd:

To know why Islam is a mortal danger one must not only consider the Koran
but also the character of Muhammad, who conceived the Koran and the entirety
of Islam.
The Koran is not just a book. Muslims believe that Allah himself wrote it
and that it was dictated to Muhammad in the original version, the Umm
al-Kitab, which is kept on a table in heaven. Consequently one cannot argue
with the contents. Who would dare to disagree with what Allah himself has
written? This explains much of Muhammadan behaviour, from the violence of
jihad to the hatred and persecution of Jews, Christians and other
non-Muslims and apostates. What we in the West regard as abnormal, is
perfectly normal for Islam.
A second insuperable problem with Islam is the figure of Muhammad....

Reading an "old" (March 21) Telegraph analysis of the Libyan "rebels," I came across this cute little detail about the family ties that bind al Qaeda and the AQ-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG):

The US ambassador to the UN and the commander of NATO can fight over "flickers" of al Qaeda and Hezbollah among the Libyan rebels, but it's clearly indisputable that enemy Hezbollah leader Nasrallah (along with al Qaeda's Abu Yahya al-Libi and MB's Qaradawi as noted here) is firmly in their camp. Which means "our" camp. This is clear from an hour-plus address the Iranian puppet and terror-master gave earlier this month in Beirut.

But there's more to it than that.

I listened to about 20 minutes. After Nasrallah insists neither al Qaeda nor Iran (hah) nor, for that matter, the United States, have had anything to do with unrest in the Middle East, I heard his chilling iteration of the "R2P" driver I've been working through and writing about lately: Israel as the Umma's pricetag to "reconsider the US stance." (Nasrallah's phrase.) What's chilling is that this combination devil's-fool's bargain is one our Intelligentsia (many with big jobs in the Obama administration) seem all too eager to make, despite its immorality, strategic senselessness and sheer ignorance -- as though feeding the jihad beast will make it anything but more rapacious.

Today, NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis told the US Senate something some of us have been noticing from afar ever since this weirdo-bizarre R2P "humanitarian" assault in Libya on American national interest began:

"We have seen flickers in the intelligence of potential al Qaeda, Hezbollah."

Hezbollah was a new one on me.

That means the US military is fighting on behalf of flickers that took down the World Trade Center in 2001 and the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983.

Does anyone care?

Next question: Wouldn't it be great is Admiral Stavridis next told the Senate that, as a result of this heinous policy, he would be stepping down from his command in protest?

But no. Instead, he reassured the Senate "We would be examining very closely the content, composition, the personalities, who are the leaders of these opposition forces."

Aaron Klein is another one of the rare writers who key into Obama's hard Left vibe (and he wrote a great book about it, too), eschewing explanations of "inexperience" or "ineptitude" to parse Obama. Having carried the " R2P" story down the line to George $oro$ last week (link below), Klein reports that a principal author of RSP, Ramesh Thakur (above left) also happens to be -- uncap your smelling salts -- a proponent of "international redistribution."

Klein writes at WND.com:

The author of a military doctrine used by the Obama administration to justify the recent airstrikes targeting the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya recently advocated for a "global rebalancing" and "international redistribution" to create a "New World Order."

The author, Ramesh Thakur, is a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which is in partnership with an economic institute founded by philanthropist billionaire George Soros....

When parsing Barack Obama, it's essential to see his hard Left ideological incubation as the prism through with to view his actions. In this way, "dithering" or "ineptitude" do not measure up as explanations for his failings to serve American interests, even though both are continually offered as such by his critics. As a hard Leftist, he has no American interests as "narrowly" defined: They are lost in a grab-bag of what we might call global-elite interests, a noxious package of motivations and beliefs derived from Big Daddy Marxism, anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, anto-colonialism, pro-Third Worldism, Frantz Fanonism, chip-on-his-shoulderism.... Thus, looking for morning-after critiques of Obam's speech on Libya, I was hoping for a more or less ideological understanding of what was really going on. Stanley Kurtz, one of the few writers who approach Obama through this hard Left prism (he actually wrote a book about it), offers this take, via The Corner:

In this week's syndicated column, I make the exceedingly obvious point that in fighting in support of the Libyan "rebels," the United States is now fighting in support of the Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood jihad.

More evidence of same in a piece about rebel commander and "Islamic Emir" Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, by John Rosenthal at PJM.

Excerpt:

In his more recent remarks to Il Sole 24 Ore, al-Hasadi admits not only to fighting against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but also to recruiting Libyans to fight against American forces in Iraq. As noted in my earlier PJM report here, captured al-Qaeda personnel records show that al-Hasadi’s hometown of Darnah sent more foreign fighters to fight with al-Qaeda in Iraq than any other foreign city or town and “far and away the largest per capita number of fighters.” Al-Hasadi told Il Sole 24 Ore that he personally recruited “around 25” Libyans to fight in Iraq. “Some have come back and today are on the front at Ajdabiya,” al-Hasadi explained, “They are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists.” “The members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader,” al-Hasadi added.

I'll admit, there is an argument – a thin, riddled, web of an argument – that it was U.S. interests that drove military interventions gone wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't buy the argument: As it morphed into a nation-building fantasy, it became disastrously, tragically and recklessly mistaken. But I can see at least that tarnished glimmer of national interest flash in the sludge before sinking from sight.

Nothing like this is to be found in the sands of Libya. This is why the weirdo-bizarre assault on Gadhafi's forces led, but supposedly not really, by the United States under order of the U.N. Security Council (motley crew) and the Arab League (rogue's gallery), crossed a fat, red line. The president of the United States sent the U.S. military, already stretched and worn by nearly a decade of wars, into harm's way for no compelling American reason.

And I mean none. The sudden whim to rid the planet of Gadhafi, while never a bad notion, is, if anything, oddly anticlimactic after his Bush-era debut as a newly minted ally in the "war on terror." Funny thing: "ally" sounds like a ghastly stretch, but WikiLeaks tells us Gadhafi was in fact most cooperative in providing anti-jihad intelligence – which may or may not have been credible. Still, he should know. It was Libyans, according to a 2007 West Point study, who made the strongest showing, per capita, of foreign insurgents in Iraq. It's hard not to believe that some who didn't end up dead or in Gitmo are now "rebels" receiving U.S. air and sea support.

I wasn't even looking for this. I just went to the ISAF website to see whether the grossly underreported weekend murders of two American soldiers (and shootings of four others) by an Afghan security contractor -- again -- was considered newsy enough to post by the official powers that be. "The slayings bring to nine the number of U.S. soldiers who have been killed by rogue Afghan security force members, whether uniformed or private security contractors, in the past two months," NBC reports.

Nine? In the last two months? That whizzed by totally unaccounted for. Did any democratically elected officials even think to ask Gen. Petraeus about it?

I still don't know if ISAF tallied up these latest bodies in a public count. That's because the first item to present itself...

Photo caption: "Forty-two years of nightmare...Now has come the time of Jihad!" -- courtesy Uncle Sucker (photo via John Rosenthal)

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Back in August 2005, I wrote a column on what was a particularly great day for sharia, or Islamic law. It was a day that marked

the end of the constitutional wrangling in Iraq and the beginning of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Both events — fought for, facilitated, even micromanaged by the U.S. of A. — should expand the domain of Islamic law, which codifies female inferiority and religious inequality. ... By day's end, Iraq, if it settles as expected on a draft constitution based in sharia, and Gaza, as a new sector of the already sharia-vested Palestinian Authority, will have joined the...

Candidate Obama at an Indiana gas station in 2008, blasting GWB and oil companies for ... high gas prices.

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This week's syndicated column:

With poor Japan's nuclear reactors in crisis; with Middle East violence stripping bare American recklessness in relying on an Arab oil supply; with prices rising fast at the local gas pump, there is an almost apocalyptic tension growing in the absence of action on the American energy problem: Tons -- or, rather barrels and cubic feet -- of resources, and no will or even interest on the part of our trusted, responsible and feckless elected leaders to get it.

What is their problem? What is our problem?

Sarah Palin posted about this emerging crisis this week (and created a not-so-small news cycle in the process), taking on "The 4-Dollar-Per-Gallon President," which is probably a low-ball figure. Palin scored President Obama's energy program, which, at best, does nothing to reverse the rise in prices at the pump even in the long-term,...

If there weren't a blanket taboo on debating Islam (witness Rep. King's PC-gagged and bound hearings), maybe more lawmakers would realize the utter futility and irresponsible waste in Western-style nation-building in a sharia culture. As it is, the debate as described below is faintly reminscent of the story of the blind men and the elephant....

From the LA Times:

Congressional Republicans on Thursday held fast to support for the Afghanistan war, heavily opposing a troop withdrawal in a vote that tested whether conservative new members would adhere to the party leaders on a significant question of U.S. policy.
Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich...